Are you planning on submitting an abstract to BlogTalk Downunder?
The Call for Papers closes Monday, 31st January, 2005.
That’s just 2 weeks away!!
As most Australians are now heading back to work after the break – and with schools and universities still on holidays – what better time to prepare your abstracts?!!!
Here’s the Blogtalk Downunder Website. We are developing an exciting program, so make sure you have subscribed to the RSS feed or email notification of changes – new information is being constantly added to the site!!!
Any questions?
Just email Anne.Bartlett-Bragg [at] uts.edu.au (or me :o)
Like Alan I reckon this is a very interesting and worthwhile discussion but while he tears off on a very interesting riff on the value of RSS beyond what is simply ‘new’ I find myself coming back to my main usage of RSS which is to aggregate news sources and in particular my recent ‘Not the WebCT or Blackboard Blog‘ stuff for which I subscribed to a host of RSS searches through various providers.
As with Stephen I used Bloglines, Pubsub & Feedster (& I would have used Technorati had I known that their watchlists are now free) in order to get most recent news results (in this case for two pretty simple searches, ‘blackboard’ and ‘webct’). This was a pretty positive experience as it dug up a heck of a lot of postings that would otherwise never have crossed the radar, especially using a search engine and to be honest I found these to be of real value because they were live, developing and new (which was, in part, a reason why I started it, to demonstrate what webct or blackboard could do if they wanted to).
Now had I run those terms through a search engine I would have got, ahem, 3,860,000 for blackboard and 2,830,000 for WebCT… probably largely unbrowsable, mostly out of date, irrelevant and also, a pain in the arse to look through (with the Google 20 word or so extract). While a more defined search would certainly have brought up more relevant content, in essence I was looking for anything Bb or WebCT related and consequently wouldn’t want to do that.
Indeed, I’ve also found that subscribing to Google News updates has been an equally fruitless experience, essentially flooding you with airy, poorly written PR fluff about how ‘x and x’ have made $xm and how great everyone is… there’s hardly a world of critical journalism out there in this area I can tell you!
Finally, while subscribing to all those searches was definitely a valuable thing for me to do I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re able to / want to devote a serious part of your life to it (you get a lot of stuff even on RSS search alone) and think that in the end, I’m much happier using my own, personally designed, human operated, filtered and annotated search engine… the 190-odd blogs I subscribe to which share the good bits, cut the crap out and give me a chance to discuss and think about the stuff in hand.
Cool, here’s a blog kept by Nathan Bailey. This is especially cool me-wise because he’s from Monash (a uni round the corner from me), it’s hosted at a Monash address http://weblog.its.monash.edu.au:8880/kd/ and he’s the main man for their portal development. And the more people in Unis in Melbourne talking RSS, blogs, podcasting etc. etc. the better!!!
It helps that it’s a pretty interesting blog too… here’s a post on the practical implications of podcasting and voicemail (which you’d have to be an IT guy to think of ;o)… if they accept the podcasting paper at the Radio Conf then this’ll be something I’ll be looking into even more!
I get the feeling this is another positive Lindon legacy too.
Am getting a bit bored of this now, think I have made my point though… perhaps :o)
Getting a lot of press this week has been Derek Morrison’s latest article on Moodle as a Bb / WebCT alternative. It’s well worth a read in its entirety but here’s a spoiler:
“Although this is a brief and initial account of a work-in-progress we believe all the participants have created an online course to the design that we want and not one forced on to us by the VLE. We have been able to concentrate on providing a rich and dynamic environment for the students and Moodle sits in the background doing its job.”
[personally I figure the best thing Moodle could do for itself is some re-skinning!]
All over the searchsphere is the announcement that Bb will be ‘accelerating’ (ick!) elearning in China. Basically “more than 40 universities and schools across China have chosen The Blackboard Learning System(TM), provided by CerBibo Corporation, to power their online learning environments” which is probably good for them, but just because these organisations are buying Bb doesn’t mean they’re ‘accelerating’ elearning! Providing funding for research, developing new approaches, working with communities, building in cultural-specific aspects or just doing something NEW is ‘accelerating’ things… selling lots of units is selling lots of units.
Somebody should have a word with the PR manager at the bottom of this article… this is just the kind of farcical rubbish that will turn the market off you once its stopped panicking. Perhaps. We hope.
This is definitely a Bb day, here are a couple of prizes they’re offering. The second one made me chuckle: “the Blackboard Greenhouse Project … “awards grant funding for initiatives that promote the adoption of Internet technology in the educational environment.”” So, that’d be the adoption of Bb, right :o)
Finally, on a positive note, Scott points to a plugin which will allow you to see if your WebCT / Bb course is *really* accessible (i.e. it can actually be used rather than just having the potential to be used).
And maybe I’m all wrong, it looks like some Blackboarders are using blogs!!!
Oh, that’d just be to post bulleted sales points extracted from a letter, nevermind…
Well, a quick redesign over the weekend (more usability than beauty) gave me an opportunity to incorporate a couple of things I’ve wanted for a while, one of them being a ‘what’s this‘ link next to my RSS feed which explains, I hope, in as few words as possible what it is and how people can use it… wonder if it’ll be any use…
Always nice to get back on a Monday morning (after a week off) to the feeling of belonging in your workplace, sharing the same vision, being cared for and caring right back.
Instead, first thing I got on my email was an automated note from high up that all of my .mp3 files had been automatically deleted on my web-drive and in my ‘phoenix’ backup (Phoenix is the horrible ‘you-must-all-be-the-same’ application which I steadfastly avoid by hibernating my PC rather than shutting it down and only rebooting offline). This is down to, ahem, the University identifying that these files may not be for study or Uni business. I can, apparently, get them back as long as they were acquired “legitimately” (their “”s not mine!) and are able to prove, through my supervisor, that they are OK (which I can’t really do as they’ve just been deleted ;o)
Needless to say they didn’t stop to ask whether I might be involved in strategic projects requiring .mp3 recordings, or podcasting for teaching and learning or actually listen to the bloody things!!! (sample text “Um, OK, this is James Farmer testing out Podcasting…” / “Today I’m talking to xxx xxxxxxx about competition law…” etc. etc. etc.)
We’ll see if I get them back or not… it would seem obvious but I wouldn’t bet me house on it!
(p.s. please remember this is a workplace-anonymous blog, if anything gets posted that indicates where I’m working then I’ll have to delete it / scrub the post… thankyou :O)
Update: Seems like ‘non-top-level’ admin are doing a good job with trying to get it reversed though… we shall see which side wins!
Am getting a bit bored of this now, think I have made my point though… perhaps :o)